This year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo, is a fifty-four-year-olddissidentand writerjailedin China. He wasdetainedat the end of two thousand eight, before thereleaseof a political reform document he helped organize. "Charter 08"calls forgreater freedom ofassembly, expression and religion. Last December he wassentencedto eleven years in prison forincitingsubversion.

China says Liu Xiaobo is a criminal and that what he has done goes against the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize. It says the award couldharmrelationsbetween China and Norway.

But the Norwegian Nobel Committee said there is a "closeconnection betweenhuman rightsand peace." Torbjorn Jaglund is the committeechairman.

There are three chemistry prize winners this year. Two are Japanese, Ei-ichi Negishi of Purdue University in the United States and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University. The third is American Richard Heck from the University of Delaware.

They developed aprocessthatsimplifiedhow carbon atoms are stuck together to produce new materials. Their methods are used to create everything from new drugs to electronics.

The three winners chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will share the award of one and a half million dollars in December.

This year's prize in physics goes to Russian-born Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both from Manchester University in Britain. They won for their experiments with a form of carbon called graphene. It started with a simple experiment, usingstickytapetopick uppieces of graphite, the same material found in pencils. That was only six years ago.

Graphene is just one atomthick,thinenough tosee through, butextremelystrong for its size. And electricity can pass through it quickly without much loss of energy. There could be many uses, from electronics to aircraft.

The prize in medicine goes to Britain's Robert Edwards for the development ofin-vitrofertilization. With IVF, eggs are removed from a woman, fertilized in a laboratory and then placed into thewomb.

This process hasledto the birth of four million people since the first "test-tube baby," Louise Brown, in nineteen seventy-eight. The Catholic ChurchopposesIVF, in part becauseunusedeggs are often destroyed.

The eighty-five-year-old scientist developed it with British surgeon Patrick Steptoe, who died in nineteen eighty-eight. Nobel winners must be living.